Month: March 2025

If you hang around township halls in rural America, you’ll hear wind turbines being blamed for damn near everything, as one farmer confirmed for me a few weeks ago, above.

You’ll also hear people swear up and down that, according to their research, wind turbines have some kind of impact on health. For more than a decade we’ve been told that wind development in any community would bring on a zombie apocalypse.
Well, we have a lot of communities now that have had wind farms for more than a decade, and the zombies have not shown up. What has shown up is vastly increased funding for Schools, roads, fire-rescue, sheriff road patrols, libraries, senior services, garbage collection, and a host of other amenities that enhance health, safety, and welfare in rural areas.
I have a whole resource website with information on this at wind101.info.

Vice:

Whenever the subject of windmills comes up with Donald Trump, usually because he brought it up, entirely unprompted, he always brings up a bizarre “condition” called wind turbine syndrome.

Due in part to the fact that he is a deeply stupid individual, he believes that the sound of a wind turbine turning and turning, infinitely, in its ceaseless quest to generate energy, can eventually drive a person mad.

A Polish study found that wind turbine syndrome is complete bullshit and that maybe Trump should shut the fuck up about it already. That last part wasn’t their conclusion, it was mine

The researchers from Adam Mickiewicz University have specialties in neuroscience and acoustics. Donald Trump’s expertise is being a corporatist who repeats whatever half-remembered gibberish an oil lobbyist spat at him during a round of golf.

In the study, researchers played 45 college students the sound of environments with different sound profiles — traffic sounds, silence, and the mechanical hum of wind turbines. To eliminate bias, the participants were never told what the purpose of the study was.

Continue reading “Gee, You Mean “Wind Turbine Syndrome” was BS the Whole Time?”

Traditional American Spiritual about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.

Another rendering below:

Continue reading “Music Break: Brian Bowers – Ezekiel”

More from my conversation with veteran Meteorologist Jeff Masters.
Above, a warning from America’s most lethal storm, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. Project 2025’s restrictions on scientist’s communication with foreign colleagues could lead to information gaps and blind spots.

Below, DOGE are “cocky and incompetent fools that are doing surgery on a patient that doesn’t need surgery, using chainsaws”.
But tell us what you really think, Jeff…

Sobering PBS Newshour update on current conditions in Western North Carolina, the Asheville area, devastated by Hurricane Helene in September.

Some residents have gotten needed help, municipalities have benefitted from funding for cleanup and support services, but many homeowners have fallen thru the cracks.

Project 2025, currently carpet bombing agencies across the federal government, has plans to break up FEMA, and leave states entirely responsible for disaster coping and cleanup.

CNBC expert underlines, again, that “Drill Baby Drill” does not intersect with reality.

It’s been jokingly suggested, as I posted the other day, that Trump’s agenda is so chaotic and counter productive, that it potentially hurts the fossil fuel industry that the “Drill Baby Drill” agenda was supposed to help.
The trend continues.
Trump is out selling Teslas while his tariffs threaten premier internal combustion brands.

If Democrats suggested this as a fuel efficiency move, they would be pilloried. MAGA just gets in line.

Wall Street Journal:

“America’s most popular pickup truck might not be able to outrun President Trump’s new tariffs on steel and aluminum.

The Ford F-150, the top-selling vehicle in the U.S. and the automaker’s main profit engine, is one of the industry’s biggest users of aluminum. The Trump administration reinstated early Wednesday a blanket 25% tariff on steel imports and boosted the levy on aluminum made outside the U.S. “

The tariffs are the latest Trump administration trade barrier that threatens to inflate already-high car prices. Together, the metals account for more than half the materials that go into cars, and costs from the tariffs likely will get passed along to car buyers, analysts say. 

If left in place, they could on average inflate the costs to automakers of building a car by about $400 per vehicle, according to research from Barclays.

Continue reading “Trump’s Secret Green Agenda Rolls On”

Above, just a year ago, Trump’s major theme was that EVs were ridiculous, too expensive, and “they don’t go far.”

Yesterday, he was debasing the White House by staging a Tesla sales event on behalf of biggest donor Elon Musk.

Business Insider:

Meanwhile:

BBC:

People protesting against Tesla should be labelled domestic terrorists, President Donald Trump said on Tuesday at a White House media event designed to bolster Elon Musk’s electric car company.

Trump sat in the driver’s seat of a brand new red Tesla that he said he planned to buy, with Musk in the passenger seat, but did not test drive it.

Demonstrators have targeted Tesla showrooms in recent weeks in protest against Musk’s cost-cutting role in Trump’s administration.

Trump said they were “harming a great American company”, and anyone using violence against the electric carmaker would “go through hell”.

Continue reading “Crazy Donnie’s Big Sales Event: He’s INSANE – and it Might Not Help Tesla”

I spoke last week to Meteorologist and long time friend of the blog Jeff Masters.
We discussed recent hurricane developments, outlook for the coming season, and, in this clip, the un-wisdom of cutting NOAA research, scientists, and forecasters.
Turns out if you don’t know when, where, and how strong a storm is going to hit, it can cost you big time.

Journal of Health Economics and Outcomes Research:

While strategies to slow the rate of climate change and its damaging effects are crucial to addressing the root problem, early warning systems can save lives and reduce economic loss from the extreme weather that we are certain to encounter in the coming years.

Unfortunately, nearly half the world’s countries, primarily less-developed countries, lack early warning systems of the technology or regulatory frameworks to generate forecasts. The good news is that early warnings are effective and cost-effective. For example:

*An early warning system can yield a nearly tenfold return on investment (ROI).

• Spending US$800 million on early warning in developing countries could prevent $3 billion to $16 billion in losses per year.
• Twenty-four hours’ notice can reduce the damage from a hazardous event by 30%.

Above, Michigan farmer who helped bring wind, and now solar fields, to his community hopes that his positive message will break through to Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, a reckoning is coming in the US House.

With the margin razor thin in the US House, the loss of even one or two Republican votes will cause any initiative to fail, as Democrats seem united.
Now we approach the moment of truth for key clean energy programs that have been creating thousands of jobs in Red districts across the country, and lawmakers are a bit skittish about chopping incentives that are making their home communities prosper.

Politico:

A growing number of House Republicans are urging the party to preserve the clean energy tax credits in Democrats’ climate law — and warning they may oppose the party’s budget bill if those incentives get axed.

In a letter shared exclusively with POLITICO, 21 House Republicans — whose districts have drawn billions in new investments because of the Inflation Reduction Act incentives — said developing clean energy was critical for the U.S. to meet President Donald Trump’s goal of becoming “energy dominant.” And they threatened to resist their colleagues’ efforts to gut the law to help pay for a small fraction of the GOP’s multi-trillion-dollar tax-cut package.

“We have 20-plus members saying, ‘Don’t just think you can repeal these things and have our support,’” said Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), who organized the letter.

Continue reading “Republicans Wobble on Clean Energy Cuts”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, at a conference, tells cheering fossil fuel executives he is swinging energy policy “180 degrees” – turning the Titanic back toward the iceberg.

Sounds good, like “Drill Baby Drill”, but Mr Wright knows it’s a lie.
Coincidentally I’m sure, Mr Wright, a fracking millionaire, stands to gain as the US exports more Liquified Fossil gas – further impoverishing already stressed Americans, but raising the price, and the value of his holdings.

New York Times:

Mr. Wright, however, was dismissive of renewable power, which he said played only a small role in the world’s energy mix. Natural gas currently supplies 25 percent of raw energy globally, before it is converted into electricity or some other use. Wind and solar only supply about 3 percent, he said. He noted that gas also had a variety of other uses — it could be burned in furnaces to heat homes or used to make fertilizer or other chemicals — that were hard to replicate with other energy sources.

“Beyond the obvious scale and cost problems, there is simply no physical way wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas,” Mr. Wright said.

Mr. Wright has argued that there is a moral case for fossil fuels,saying they are crucial for alleviating global poverty and that moving too quickly to cut emissions risks driving up energy prices around the world. He has denounced efforts by countries to stop adding greenhouse gas to the atmosphere by 2050, calling that a “sinister goal.”

At a conference in Washington last week, Mr. Wright said that African countries needed more energy of all kinds to lift themselves out of poverty, including coal, the most polluting fossil fuel. “We’ve had years of Western countries shamelessly saying don’t develop coal, coal is bad,” he said. “That’s just nonsense.”

In Houston on Monday, other oil and gas executives echoed Mr. Wright’s remarks, pitching oil and gas as the best solution for impoverished people in developing nations around the world.

Continue reading “Forward into the Abyss”